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Why Our Candidates Disappoint Us

Listeners at a Mitt Romney campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, this month.Credit
Dave Weaver for The New York Times

Atlanta

AS a psychotherapist for more than 25 years, I’ve never been fond of boilerplate formulations. But if there’s one aphorism I’ve repeated to patients many times, it’s one that applies as much in politics as it does in daily life: Our strengths and our weaknesses tend to flow from the same wells.

Understanding that about ourselves can help make life easier. And understanding that about our politicians can help explain why, after more than 30 million people have tuned in to the Republican debates, the most popular political figure or institution in the country remains “none of the above.”

In everyday life, the ability to deal comfortably with authority or accept “how things have always been done” can produce a good teammate or employee. But it can also lead someone to nod his head approvingly as a leader is about to make a catastrophic decision. Similarly, a tendency to value reason and intellect in decision-making is invaluable, but its flip side can be a discomfort with emotion that can interfere not only with intimacy in close relationships but, paradoxically, with good decision-making.

Making good decisions requires an ability to anticipate the emotional consequences of one course of action or another, often by listening to “gut-level” rumblings that provide an early warning signal that something is amiss.

Perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise. All of us have the misfortune of having grown up in imperfect families, born with a set of designer genes that even millions of years of evolution couldn’t tailor to perfection. And from that pool of imperfect people we draw our leaders, many of whom are attracted to politics as much by their weaknesses as by their strengths.

Those weaknesses seem to be on display today, as voters face the possibility that their choice next November may be between the quintessential “corporation man” in Mitt Romney, a character straight off the set of “Mad Men” but seemingly without the character development, and the intellectualized undecider in Barack Obama, who couldn’t seem to feel, until recently, the “fierce urgency of now” for people desperate for a job or crushed by a mortgage.

In fact, attitudes toward authority and intellect are essential differences between political parties of the right and left and they help explain why most Americans believe the Republicans and Democrats could both use some time on the couch.

Conservatism is by its nature concerned with preserving tradition, and with tradition comes a greater emphasis on obedience and hierarchy. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” rolls off the lips of many of my fellow Georgians, but it’s not among the top proverbs in Manhattan. Because of their attitude toward authority and hierarchy, Republicans in Congress are more likely to follow their leaders (although the tea in the Tea Party has added some libertarian spices for which some Republican leaders are still trying to develop a taste). This aptitude for synchronized swimming can lead to Olympic victories, but also to Pyrrhic ones.

Democrats on the other hand react so strongly against taking “marching orders” that they can scarcely stay on message even if their political lives depend on it (which they often do). Whether because he wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to do or because he took the laissez-faire attitude toward leadership that bedevils the Democratic Party, President Obama let a Democratic Congress craft his signature legislation on health care. The result was a patchwork quilt that took 15 months to sew, and was stitched so sloppily that it left the average American cold.

Just as the two parties differ in their attitudes toward authority, they diverge in the value they place on intellect. In both cases, the two parties might have something to learn from each other.

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Whereas Democrats have carried forward the belief in the role of science and knowledge in improving our lives, Republicans have moved in increasingly anti-intellectual directions. Three of the Republican presidential hopefuls report entering the race at the urging of God, a claim that would have distressed the founders, who rejected claims to leadership by divine right.

It is deeply ironic that the Republican Party, long the party of privilege, has become the party that champions the view that anyone — from an exterminator (Tom DeLay, former House majority leader) to the owner of a pizza joint (Bobby Schilling, freshman congressman from Illinois) — has what it takes to run a country.

Yet if the Republican presidential debates have demonstrated anything, it is that intellect is not just a liability for a Republican primary contender, but a disqualifier. It is no accident that Mitt Romney has had to renounce the best thing he ever did for the people of Massachusetts as governor — passing health care legislation that actually allows the people of the state to go to the doctor when they’re sick.

Democrats, in contrast, are too likely to view intellect as both necessary (which it is) and sufficient (which it is not) for high office. They have repeatedly presented the American people with candidates — Hubert H. Humphrey, Walter F. Mondale, Michael S. Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry — with more than enough gray matter to be the world’s chief executive but not enough of the other skills that matter to the American people. Those qualities, which many Democrats perceive as “irrational,” are quintessentially rational if the goal is to lead, to implement policies effectively, and to keep voters engaged between elections so they can weigh in to coerce their elected representatives to represent them when members of Congress are disinclined to do so (usually, today, because of the competing demands of their campaign contributors).

THE ability to “read” the emotions of the electorate and to speak to those emotions in a compelling way do more for both electoral success and legislative success than I.Q. Similarly important is the ability to articulate a vision and a set of values, which is a far better predictor of voting behavior than positions on “the issues.”

This is something Republicans understand far better than Democrats, and something Ronald Reagan mastered. George W. Bush’s success in moving both his domestic and foreign policy agendas reflected his ability to spell out his values. Americans prefer candidates who share their values, but they are least inclined to vote for someone who hides them.

Mitt Romney’s difficulty in breaking 25 percent in the polls among Republican primary voters, despite his likelihood of being the Republican nominee, reflects more than anything the fact that voters have no idea what he really believes — a problem that dogged John McCain in 2008.

Republicans are right about another quality that distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective ones: experience. Republicans are fond of pointing out the advantages of having run a business or a state before becoming C.E.O. of the world’s largest economy (although, of course, that argument helps candidates friendly to their free-market philosophy). Obama was the first sitting senator to win the presidency since John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and perhaps the least experienced person ever to occupy the Oval Office. (Bill Clinton, by contrast, who was a year younger than Obama at the time he was elected, was the nation’s longest-serving governor.)

Perhaps the American people are on to something.

Cognitive scientists have long distinguished between “generic knowledge” — knowing something, like the ingredients in a chocolate cake or the number of Democratic senators — and “procedural knowledge” — knowing how to do something, like how to beat an egg so the cake comes out right, or how to browbeat a senator or two so a piece of legislation comes out right. From a neurological perspective, these are very distinct forms of knowledge. As knowledge shifts from generic to procedural, from effortful, conscious thought to effortless, unconscious procedures, our brains process it differently and more efficiently.

If the American people aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid from either side of the aisle, it’s probably because they don’t trust the water from either well.

Drew Westen is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 30, 2011, on Page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Our Candidates Disappoint Us. Today's Paper|Subscribe